What a klutz!

When I was growing up, we would go and visit my Aunt, Uncle and Grandmother who lived in OH. My aunt had the most gorgeous 1930's lamp with two round globes, one on the top and one of the bottom of the lamp. They were milky white with violets on both of them. A real heirloom. I remember always seeing that lamp setting in a place of obvious favor on a round table in front of the front window. It sat there for years. I was always allowed to look, but knew never to touch it. I adored that lamp. It made it through the years of my childhood and all of my cousins that came to visit and play. No one ever bumped that table where the lamp sat.

Years later my Aunt and Uncle moved to a new house in a new town just up the road. We visited there a time or two and then my Uncle passed away. I got married and my new husband and I went to go to a couple of amusement parks in the area and stayed with my Aunt. We were having a wonderful visit, catching up and just enjoying each other's company. I have always been a rather clumbsy person, and nothing still has changed. I like the facebook group that said I could trip over flat surfaces. I think I have actually tripped over my own shadow before... Well, my Aunt had this beautiful collection of Home Interior's porcelain animals on a side table by her door. Across the walkway was her chair and a side table with the much adored lamp on it. My new husband and I were getting ready to go out for dinner with my Aunt. I was looking at all the porcelain animals she had and talking to her about them while she got her jacket on. I made a motion with my arm and pushed my elbow back and caught the top of the lamp and knocked it out into the middle of the hardwood floor...I was mortified! My Aunt just laughed and brushed it off, cleaned up the glass and refused to take any money for a replacement. And she also gave me a nickname that has stuck to this day...she calls me "Klutz" and everytime she does, everyone knows why and gets a good laugh out of it. What a gracious lady she is, in so many more ways than just this. It taught me that things aren't what is important in life, people are. I knew it anyway, but it was such a wonderful way for her to show it to me in more than just theory!

Let's talk fire alarms...

Today, I am wondering about fire alarms and just how the infernal things work. Everytime I make a pizza or bake Chris's bread I set the oven on 425 degrees. This is a hot oven, but normal for baking things like this. The fire alarm joins in with the beeper that tells me the oven is at the proper temperature. Now my Mother's first rule of cooking is that the fire alarm is not the signal that the food is done, but mine goes off when it is supposed to go in...

On Wed. I was baking and of course, the fire alarm is going off. It would not stop so I took it down and took it outside on the porch banister. That night when Chris came home he brought it in and said it wouldn't do much good for us out there. He knows how it works, so it was no surprise to him to find it out there. I put it back up and didn't think anything more about it.

On Thursday, I was boiling water to drink and make Kool-aid. Our city water has more nasty in it than a well in a village in the middle of a cholera outbreak in the 1300's. I was pouring the hot water into a pitcher to cool, and the pitcher started to overflow. I grabbed a kitchen towel and threw it on the counter to stop the water from running down on the laminate floor. Well, the edge of the towel fell across the stove and I didn't see it and it caught fire. I had turned around to grab some paper towels for the water too, and when I turned back around I grabbed the water pitcher and poured it on the fire. And the entire time the fire alarm remained completely SILENT. Not a peep...hmmmm. Now how does that work??

Exercise - a dirty 7 letter word

Ok, I admit it, I HATE to sweat. And like I told Chris the other day while we were walking on the trail, if there is a bear chasing me, I might think about running, but playing dead sounds a lot easier... Walking the rail-trail, and riding bikes there too, is about all the exercise I want. When it comes to exercise equipment, I have about as much luck with it as I have with lawn mowers - see my previous blog. Besides, I used to take excuses for gym class from my Mom, and was raised that "bodily exercise profiteth little" ( 1 Tim. 4:8). I always wore dresses, and couldn't participate in a lot of the things that they were doing in gym class.

One day, Chris and I went to visit his parents. I had been there a few times before, so it wasn't my first visit. Good thing too... We talked with them a while and were discussing buying a treadmill. They had one, and wanted us to walk on theirs to see what we thought. Chris walks on it a few minutes and gets off and tells me to try it out. So I did. I had never been on a treadmill before, and I am so clumbsy that my nickname in my family is either "klutz" or "grace". Chris fastened the little shut off clip to my shirt and they started it up and I stepped off the sides and on the machine. Then they started talking to me. And that was all she wrote... The next thing I know I am flying off the thing backwards, hitting the wall and lying in a heap in the corner behind the machine, and my toe is throbbing! Chris and his dad are cracking up laughing and his Mom is shrilly telling them to get me up! No one knows for sure what exactly happened, but there were tread burns on my toe and it apparently got caught under the edge of the tread and twisted. All the guys could say is that they were sorry noone caught it on tape for America's Funniest Videos. Some help they were.

We did go on to buy a treadmill, and I used it for several weeks. One of the many times I have went on a diet and exercised and GAINED weight... So, so much for that! I'm not overweight; I'm under tall...

Time to mow the grass

Well, it's time to mow the grass! And for the entire summer we will be a slave to it's constant need to be cut. I have an interesting history with lawn mowers. It all started in my early 20's when I was charged with mowing my grandmothers quite sizable lawn. It was a push mower and it had ran out of gas. So I jumped in my old 1963 Ford truck and promptly backed over the push mower, flipped it over and finished it off...It was all downhill from there. I was still living with my parents, so I "helped" them with mowing the acre they lived on. I bent the blades and then the shaft on their pushmower twice in the span of a month. I ran over the property line marker - two different times...and burned up an electric weedeater cutting down some iris leaves. The replacement mower didn't last long either when I bent the shaft on it...Then I got my own mower with a grass catcher. It was the one that is guaranteed to start with one pull - NEVER! That thing is still hanging on by a thread. I think it's because it's a Honda. And not because I have had any more luck in taking care of it. I have done a good job of beating it up. And I am NOT trying to - I am actually trying to take care of them!

Then I met Chris...and I had never used a riding mower before. He was mowing grass at the bottom of the property when his brother-in-law came over to see a Subaru he had for sale. So as they talked and walked, Chris asked me to take the lawn mower up the drive. I told him that I had never driven a riding mower before and he was well aware of my mower history, but was equally confident that I could take it where it needed to go. So off I went. Up the driveway, around the curve and right into the back of the Subaru and up onto the bumper. That's where they found me when they got to the porch. A good laugh was had by all. I learned to use that mower and even without supervision. But we had some accidents along the way. I ran over some stumps and bent the blades, then I broke the mandrel that holds the blades up under the deck not once, but TWICE. Chris decided that I don't need a mower, I need a brush-hog! There have been so many various repairs on these mowers that I can't remember all of them. But you would think at some point I would no longer be "allowed" to mow the grass. And I do enjoy mowing grass (and shovelling snow). This past fall we got a brand new shiny red riding mower, and a few weeks ago he got it out and mowed the lawn. It drives totally differently from the last one we had, so I have no idea how to operate it. And something tells me I may never know.